


Glow of Embers

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 16:27:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2779877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thranduil falls to an orc attack near the Carrock. Beorn finds him out in the snow and brings him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glow of Embers

The Misty Mountains are never an easy path, even in the easy weather of the warm months: when the snow and the storms give way, the orcs multiply just as fast. With the snapping cold of winter already chasing at the golden heels of autumn, Thranduil knows that he runs the risk of both by taking the High Pass, but even this early in the season, the Redhorn is all but impassable and they do not have the luxury of time- so strange for an elf to always be so short of time- they would need to cut through the Gap.

Elrond’s summons were urgent, and given how little they have communicated of late, he would not send a summons at all if it wasn’t necessary. They may not like each other all that much, but Thranduil owes him the respect of rank if nothing else. He sets out while the frost has yet to reach the inner wood, with enough of a contingent with him to appease his fretful Captain of the Guard. She is badly needed at home, where the spiders encroach as slowly and inevitably as the season, but she dislikes when the elves in her charge are out of reach of her sword. Tauriel would not have been so anxious, but Tauriel is not with him anymore and her successor can hardly be blamed for being nervous to step into her shoes.

As it is, they needn’t have worried about the High Pass. Thranduil never reaches the mountains.

-

Beorn has come to know the stench of death better than he ever hoped to. It is strange to think that a few short years ago, the Battle of the Five Armies had seemed to herald the end of concerted orc numbers. It has taken them all too few seasons to restock their numbers until the packs drift back into Beorn’s territory as if they had never left. The pale orc may be gone, but little else has changed.

Returning from ousting orcs from his land, Beorn scents copper in the air over the bright flash of snow just beginning to fall, and knows with that same aching familiarity that elves have fallen in his woods. The battlefield laid out before him is a confirmation he doesn’t need. It is unnatural to see immortals lie so quiet, but then he has grown used to that too, as he has to death, as he has to the cold clasp of iron on his wrists.

He checks for life where he knows he will not find any, each pale form stiff and cold as the surrounding landscape. They have been here a while. Laid out side by side, they look like cut flowers with their pale hair and green gear. Mirkwood elves: he remembers them from the battle at the mountain when the dragon fell. Too unlike their kin to the west to be anything else: they were fatigued by the darkness and need for constant vigilance as the woods grew shadowed, and yet all the fiercer for it. It had not been enough for them today.

Twenty in total he finds strewn between the trees. The blood he finds upon the snow is not just elven, the orcs have left their fair share too though few are the carcasses he uncovers, and of the horses he scents but cannot see there is only the churned up bloody mire to show they were there. Taken by the orcs for meat most likely, though even this early in the winter orcs are not so fussy as to leave elven bodies for the earth to have. No, they have left things as they are for a purpose.

Often there is reason even in orcish madness, but the direction of it eludes Beorn. A warning for him seems unlikely, for there is no great feeling of any kind between himself and the elves. A strike at them would not automatically be a strike at him, even on his own land, though that concerns him too. It can only be meant for the elves, whether the residents of Rivendell just over the pass or those of Mirkwood who will come looking for their kin soon enough. Leaving them for Beorn to find just ensures the message is received. Still, the reason for it is unclear.

He checks amongst the fallen elves he has collected and finds little that will tell him the truth of the matter. If the elves knew, they have taken their secrets with them. All they share beyond a final resting place is a common mark upon their armour, a crest he can make little sense of but assumes to be an emblem of the eastern elven realm.

His answer lies further upstream, far enough from the rest of the massacre that his first scout did not venture far enough. It is the scent of elk that draws him further up, an animal that rarely strays within Beorn’s territory and certainly not in the company of horses. The marks upon the ground and snow are the same, though the trees also show the violence it took to fell such a creature and the force it had responded with. A trail of destruction takes him through to where an unnamed tributary of the great Wilderland River cut through the trees, and the mire of gore shows him where the elk finally fell.

Nor was it alone there. Beorn finds another on the bank of the stream, as ice cold as his compatriots and pale as the gently falling snow. He would not have seen the elf at all, but for the branching crown he finds abandoned a few feet away, the diminished spread of its red leaves broken on one side by rough hands, the trailing root that should have traced the jawline snapped entirely off. The elven king is little better himself, showing the marks of violent use upon his face, and by that measure a myriad more beneath his clothes.

Beorn recalls him in the chaos at the Lonely Mountain, the only ally on the field anywhere close to verging on Beorn’s height, a king clad in silver untouched by the death that tried to claim him at every turn. Was it so easy to lay him low after all when he had moved through the hordes so effortlessly before?

He kneels to gather up the king’s body, but has to pause when he spies movement. The snow drifting down in front of Thranduil’s face is stirred as if by a breeze but there is hardly a hint of wind in the air today. One hand before Thranduil’s face, one upon his neck confirms it. A breath and a beat. The king is alive.

 He will not be so for long as he is. There is little colour in his face, and the hand that trailed in the icy water is already grey. Thranduil will be lucky not to lose it, if he survives at all. The breastplate is first to be abandoned on the bank, dented and rent by rough weapons. The rest of Thranduil’s gear goes the same way until he is left in only his skin for the few moments it takes Beorn to shuck his and find his other shape. It is awkward and uncomfortable to walk upright as the bear while cradling the king against his chest, so close that they are practically skin to skin, but the need to warm Thranduil outweighs Beorn’s discomfort as he slowly makes his way back through the trees.

The snow is falling thicker than before and the trees are not tightly packed enough to hold off the worst of it. Howling winds carve between the silver trunks, dragging the drifts with them and throwing the snow up in flurries until the world is little more than a blur in icy colours. Beorn dips into the force of the wind as much as he dares to protect the elf in his arms as best he can. Between his fur and his sheer bulk, he makes a passable windbreak, but as the landscape whites out ahead of him, he struggles to keep his bearings.

Eventually he has to halt or lose them both. He sets his back against the stout trunk of an oak and sinks down so that the deep curve of his body shields Thranduil from the reach of the weather. Beorn’s fur is thick enough to spare both of them from the cold, as long as they are not entirely buried.

He has never held anyone as he cradles the elf king now, but the feel of it is familiar, the curve of his arms and the gentleness it inspires. Somewhere in the depths of his memory, the half remembered echo of a lullaby emerges, muffled by the warmth of his mother’s heavy embrace. The shadow of a father as tall as the sky, and beyond him the large shapes of siblings and cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents, stretching out into a child’s infinity. For a moment he feels them there, and the lullaby rumbles in his chest, but the metal at his wrists is cold, and the flash of it brings him back to the white of the storm. The last notes of the song are still in his throat but already vanishing, already forgetting.

He holds Thranduil closer and waits for the wind to drop. The elven king is senseless and still in his grasp.

The weather does not improve as much as he would like, but there is only so long they can remain outside before Beorn really will run the risk of being buried and his work to save Thranduil will have been for nothing. He sets out again, his awkward two footed gait only exacerbated by the continuing snowfall. His home is a welcome sight as it emerges in stages from the whiteout of the storm, stone and thatch heavy with the weight of snow. He lumbers passed the huddled shapes of his horses, who have hunkered down together in the lee of the house where the wind is not as strong, and resolves to return to them as soon as he has settled Thranduil.

Beorn’s bed absolutely dwarfs Thranduil- it is made to house the bear in a pinch, as Beorn has torn free of nightmares on occasion to find himself already halfway there- and he has relatively little in the way of blankets to warm the king. He sheds his fur as soon as he has laid Thranduil down and lies down beside him, pulling the king to him. Skin contact is best for situations like this, but it makes it no more pleasant to holds an icy cold body in his arms that shows little more life than the corpses he had to leave where he found them.

It takes longer than it should before Thranduil is even verging on something that could be considered warm, still pale as the snowfall outside, but minute tremors run through his limbs and down the length of his back. After being so still for so long, the shivering is a welcome sign. Beorn extracts himself with no small ounce of relief- it is hardly the most comfortable activity.

Now the immediate danger has passed, he must take care of the next. Thranduil has not come through unscathed by orcish blades, and the wounds must be treated or they are certain to fester. Orcs keep their blades dirty for that purpose. The salves and bandages are a seldom used gift from Radagast, and more meant for animals than elves, but if they are gentle enough for the mice Beorn sees no reason they should harm a bigger creature.

After that, he sets up what he needs to treat Thranduil’s hands and feet for the cold, though only one really seems to have the frost bitten deep enough into it to cause permanent harm. Lukewarm water to ease the ice out and then gentle wrapping: he will have to repeat this often to be safe, but that should be all it needs.

Once that has been done, he tucks the few blankets he has around the king for the time being so that he can see to the livestock now that Thranduil is warming on his own.

Thranduil’s tremors prove to be his undoing as a particularly fierce shiver upsets the bowl Beorn has set his hand in and sends it skittering across the floor. Beorn finds it as he returns, fetched up against the table. He retrieves and refills it from the flask he left near the fire, but after several tries he finds the only way to achieve his end is holding Thranduil in his lap and keeping Thranduil’s hand in the bowl with his own. It is more comfortable than holding him cold certainly.

At this close range, and with little else to distract him like before, he notices something new. He feels something delicate as morning cobwebs laid close to Thranduil’s skin, and it gives with the same elastic strength when he presses against it. Beneath his hand, the ridges and flats of burns shimmer into existence, vanishing again as soon as the pressure relents. Carefully he traces the extent of them across Thranduil’s face, the ruin of one eye and ambiguous loss of the other, the deep gouge where his cheek just falls away so suddenly Beorn expects to find his teeth exposed to the air. There is a lifetime of agony written into these scars, but the moment Beorn pulls back they vanish as if they never were, hidden away by the magic that pressed against his flesh as closely as it did to the Elven King.

Beorn scratches the tingle out of his hands and wonders how Thranduil can possibly stand it. The why is easy enough with such a proud creature, but all pride aside, an elf constantly encroached upon by spiders had to have a will of iron to stand constantly wearing cobwebs close to his skin.

It is not his business when all is said and done.

Thranduil is quiet at first, as still as the rest of his ill-fated troupe, but while Beorn has seen off the immediate danger of the cold, his wounds have not taken so well to the long exposure, or the dirty blades that made them. The fever that sets in is almost inevitable, and Thranduil is not so silent when his defences are broken by delirium.

He does not cry out as others do, but there are names upon his lips, barely more than the breath of a prayer as he moves from one nightmare to the next with only the flicker of his eyelids and the furrowed twist of his brow to show the change. Beorn knows the first, an elf born in the image of his father, a warrior, but all but missing from Beorn’s recollections of the battlefield outside Erebor. The other, the more frequent of the two, is unknown to him, but the grief in that name is something he is very familiar with.

Beorn does not try to draw him out of his hallucinations at first, because it is not up to him to interfere in the secrets of a king laid bare by illness, but as Thranduil becomes increasingly distressed and the tear tracks upon his face gleam like veins of gold in the firelight, he finds himself unable to ignore it. He holds the elf close as he did before with Thranduil’s back against his chest, feels the heat beneath his skin as surely as the ice had lain there.

The closeness seems to soothe him at first, though at times he struggles, thinking Beorn to be a foe or some other evil of his nightmares. At other times he tries to draw closer, as if they might be melded into one creature if he clutches tightly enough. Beorn does not know quite what to make of the latter, but he allows it with the same patience he allows the rest.

Night winds into day and back into the long night again with no cease in the storm that rages outside nor the fire that blazes beneath Thranduil’s skin. Beorn continues his ministrations, changes bandages and salves wounds, soaks that one cold hand to draw the warmth back into it, and allows Thranduil to find his comfort against Beorn’s skin as he wishes. He tries not to think on it too deeply or how he does not find it entirely uncomfortable himself, for that is a dangerous line of thinking.

The snow eventually eases into the second day, though the wind remains, and Thranduil’s fever finally drops. He begins to stir and Beorn gives him the space to do so while he sets the water beside the fire to warm a little.

The first words Thranduil says make no sense to him. Elvish of any form is not a language Beorn speaks. He address Thranduil as quietly as he can so as not to startle him, and tries to keep himself small where he crouches by the fire, though that is nearly impossible.

“You are in the house of Beorn. I found you out in the snow.”

He watches Thranduil slowly, painfully try to make sense of that, struggling to wrap his head around the syllables.

“There were others,” he finally says with some effort, stumbling over the Common Tongue, though Beorn knows from encountering him before that he speaks it well.

“I found no one but you,” Beorn says, settling for ambiguity. It would not be fair to put the weight of so many deaths on Thranduil when he is barely on the cusp of recovery. He does not mention that he went back once the weather allowed and buried the others, once he had checked every single face to be sure he did not lay the king’s son in the ground of his property.

It seems Thranduil is not muddled that he doesn’t take Beorn’s meaning. The soft “oh” that passes his lips seems to trigger a slow collapse back to the bed, until Thranduil is curled into himself and startlingly small. Beorn does not know how to comfort him, unsure if there really is any comfort to be given for a situation like this, but when he brings the water to soak Thranduil’s hand he holds Thranduil’s other hand too. It is mildly gratifying when he doesn’t pull away.

When Thranduil is disturbed by dreams again that night, Beorn does what he has done for the last two days and lies down beside him. It does the trick, and there is a trace of a smile upon his face when he rouses in the morning, though it quickly passes as he comes fully awake and realises where he is. Strange as it is to him, Beorn is quick enough to retreat rather than make his guest uncomfortable.

He spends some time outside, clearing the immediate area around the house so the animals have space to move and laying out food for them. The weather is beginning to deteriorate again: they will likely all be sheltering inside again before long.

Thranduil is up when he returns, wrapped up in a blanket for lack of anything else and sat near the fire, soaking his hand in the bowl Beorn left there. He has managed to remove the bandages successfully, so the fine motor skills of his other hand seem to be undamaged.

“Do not let it get too hot,” Beorn said as he passes, setting down the extra wood he collected outside.

“I know,” Thranduil replies, quiet and subdued.

Beorn leaves him to his thoughts for the time being, but when it is time to apply the salve and bandages, he is there. He offers Thranduil a tunic, one of the few spares he owns, as he kneels to see to the elf’s hand. It will swamp him undoubtedly, but it is better than the blanket, and it will go ways towards helping the elf feel a little more normal.

Thranduil murmurs something that sounds like thanks and wraps himself in the tunic as soon as Beorn releases his wrapped hand, draping the blanket back over himself afterwards. He seems more comfortable at least. That is something.

They leave each other be for the rest of the day, moving around each other without the need to speak or break the silence. Outside, the wind has picked up and the snow is beginning to fall as the light fails. Beorn catches Thranduil watching him several times and cannot tell what it is that draws his eyes, though he has his suspicions.

“Why do you still wear chains when you are free?” Thranduil eventually asks into their small bubble of quiet while beyond the storm continues to howl at the windows like an errant warg.

“Why do you hide your scars when the dragons are dead?” Beorn asks in turn without looking at him. He resists the urge to touch the cuffs at his wrists.

“It is not the same thing,” Thranduil says, but does not resist the same urge to touch his face, though he is quick enough to drop his hand again.

“No, they are not the same at all,” Beorn agrees. “At first I wore these simply because I could not remove them by myself, and I was by myself for a very long time. After that, I told myself that I wore them to show I had survived where others had not, when really I thought I had become so used to them that I would fret if they were gone.”

“And now?” Thranduil asks.

“Now I choose not to think on it too deeply. This is how things are, and that is enough.”

It is a dissatisfactory answer, he knows that and he can see it in Thranduil’s expression, but it is the only answer he has. That thin fear in his younger days has never really left, only grown more entrenched as time has passed and the cuffs remain.

“Perhaps they are not so different,” Thranduil says, with a shadow of his usual precision. “Perhaps you are hiding too.”

“So you admit that you are hiding?” Beorn replies, a deflection almost worthy of Thranduil. It does not match with what he knows of Thranduil for the king to be so candid, but then he has held the elf while they slept for the last few days and heard the secrets he spoke aloud when the fever unlocked his lips. This is hardly more than that.

“I wear a pretty mask over the ruin of my real face,” Thranduil replies, his mouth twisting in a fashion that he might not be able to fully replicate under the glamour. “It would be a bald falsehood to suggest otherwise.”

“Is it so important to appear flawless?”

“It is important not to show weakness.”

“Surviving dragon fire is hardly a weakness,” Beorn rumbles, recalling the embers of Esgaroth where the great carcass of the dragon had fallen, still so white hot in the days after the battle that just to stand upon the shore of the lake was to feel the heat searing to unbearable height.

“Elves do not tend to wear their scars as badges of honour,” Thranduil says, and there is his hand upon his cheek again though he does not seem to realise. “That is more a mannish trait.”

“Men do well to recognise that some things do not deserve shame, but pride.”

“I have pride!” Thranduil snaps, or tries to, for his voice breaks with the force and the coughing that follows shakes him hard.

“Too much of it,” Beorn says, filling a cup with water and handing it to him, “and in the wrong places.”

That is all they say to each other that night. Thranduil is well enough to sleep alone now, though he is far yet from full recovery. When the light has dimmed to only the glow of embers in the fireplace, and the shadows play over the walls like the first touches of dreams, Beorn feels a hand upon his arm and welcomes another into the bed beside him without waking fully enough to acknowledge what it is that he does. It is right, that is all he knows in the sweet warmth of the night. When he wakes in the morning and Thranduil is still there, it is harder still to refute it.

They speak little after this point, and their previous conversation is never revisited, though once Thranduil touches one of the cuffs and Beorn recognises it for the apology that it is. It is a peaceful monotony of repetition they settle into, and Beorn finds it too easy to become comfortable far too soon. It cannot last. It never does.

-

It is days before any but Beorn himself wander abroad in his territory, and the bear is waiting for them when they do. No orcs this time, the skulking troupes have not yet reappeared from wherever they secreted themselves to evade the storms. Against the odds, the elves of Rivendell have fought their way through the entrenched snow of the High Pass, and they ride hard on their errand in spite of the continuing foul weather.

The lord of the vale himself rides at their head, and he recognises Beorn as quickly in turn when the bear lumbers out to meet them. His sons travel with him as they ever do, but at his right hand rides a golden haired elf that Beorn can now recognise by name. He wears his father’s face and mannerisms even more than Beorn remembers.

It is obvious why they have come, and by the direction of their approach and the soil upon their gloves, he is sure they have found where he laid the elves of Thranduil’s guard to rest. A question trembles upon Legolas’ lips where he waits, tense as a bowstring, beside Lord Elrond. The agony in him is almost palpable.

Beorn does not greet them- it would require a change, and while he trusts Elrond he is wary of shifting where the rest of them can see- but slowly turns his back upon them and starts back towards his home, implying for them to follow him. They take his hint, and the strange troupe return back through the path he has carved through the drifts. In the deepest places it meets his shoulder, and the horses, already decidedly nervous in his presence, do not take kindly to the way it presses in on them.

Eventually they break out into the cleared area around Beorn’s house, and the commotion of their entrance brings Thranduil to the door. He looks an entirely different creature in the makeshift wrap of one of Beorn’s tunics, still swathed in a blanket and shivering in the cool air.

Legolas is out of his saddle before even Beorn can register it, sprinting past all of them to reach his father. He stops barely an arm’s length away as the way Thranduil trembles, the transparency of him finally registers. He is still not well by any stretch.

The tremulous expression upon Thranduil’s face, fear and longing and hope all at once, is only matched by Legolas’s raw relief. He reaches out with gentle hands, as though Thranduil is a dream wrought in spun glass, fragile beyond measure and likely to break at a touch. The words that pass between them as they hold each other close are soft enough that Beorn would have to strain to hear, so he does them the courtesy of turning away instead.

The elves are efficient. Thranduil is dressed in much more appropriate attire and ready to travel within the hour. Elrond has seen to him, and the healer has deemed him fit enough to make the trip to Rivendell, though they will have to take it gently. There are enough of them that a slow pace will do them little harm, even if the orcs venture out again.

Thranduil is again himself, and seems wholly out of place in Beorn’s home as he steps out of the door in elven finery, his hair braided back for the lack of his usual crown or ornaments. Even without them, he looks like a king.

Beorn wants to ask him to stay and knows he cannot. He watches, a man again but wishing he had remained the bear, as the last loose ends are tied up. Will Thranduil speak to him at all, or will they part ways with the distant gestures of strangers? Which is worse for that matter?

Thranduil approaches as the troupe make the last of their preparations, all pointedly turned away. Even Elrond allows this small modicum of imagined privacy.

“Seven days is scarcely measurable in the span of the elves,” Thranduil says. It is what Beorn is expecting and yet it still hurts more than he is prepared for.

“Little time at all,” Beorn agrees, and itches knowing that there are elven eyes politely turned away from this moment between them. Somehow it is more exposing knowing that they know but choose to look away.

Perhaps Thranduil feels the same: he holds himself tense, lacking the confidence that he has at his best, nor the fragile ease they have had for these quiet days together.

“I think I will remember this for a long time,” Thranduil eventually says, and the frustration shows in his face as he fails to say what he really means with so many ears avoiding yet inevitably listening. He takes Beorn’s hand in his, the hand that is still bandaged and stiff but whole because of Beorn, and presses a brief kiss to Beorn’s knuckles. It is a concession Beorn did not expect, and he finds himself warmed by it.

“Thank you,” Thranduil says and releases him, turning away before he can lay himself open any further.

 _You’re welcome_ , is what Beorn means to say in return. A closing statement, an ending.

“You’re welcome back,” he says instead. An invitation.

He thinks Thranduil understands. He hopes.


End file.
